9 ms·

Writing an iRacing SDK Implementation in F#

81 points by sanesmith 6y ago

tashoecraft 6y ago
Happy to see another iracer here. Got mine in June and it’s been a blast. I’ve looked into doing some dev related work, seems like the apis are funky and limitations can be quite odd. This will probably be my inspiration to build out a side project. Good luck, have fun, and see you on the track
- sanesmith 6y ago
  Thats awesome, glad I was able to inspire you! Yeah, iRacing can be tons of fun and the level of realism is impressive. I live within walking distance of Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and have walked and biked the track more times than I can count and the the sim gets so many of the track details right.
  - dan00 6y ago
    Do you have any clue how the spotter gets the info of near opponents? So the basis for the „left/right side“ messages. I would really like to have a visual spotter similar to Assetto Corsa Competizione.
- philjohn 6y ago
  The biggest limitation, IMHO, is limiting telemetry to 60hz which makes things like FFB and motion rigs less high fidelity.
enw 6y ago
Why would an API ever return a literal JavaScript statement?
- sanesmith 6y ago
  Author here! I have no idea to be honest, I thought it was strange when I saw it in the Python version too. I'm still learning the API and it seems that "iRacing’s telemetry comes in three variations, data written to an .ibt file 60 times a second, live data exposed to our telemetry API 60 times a second, and a session string in YAML format that contains more or less static information about the session. The YAML string is appended to the end of the .ibt file but only a small portion of that data is exposed to ATLAS."
- jachee 6y ago
  There are so many "Why would...?" questions in and around the iRacing world. The influx of capital from pandemic-induced interest has seen some improvement (e.g. The iRacing members' forum is now, for the first time afaik, separated from the rest of the site/service, and no longer needs to be offline during maintenance.) So, there is hope of further improvement.
- herbstein 6y ago
  iRacing is a bunch of kludges all the way down. For the longest time the only way to race was as a solo driver. However, some of the biggest races in the world of real racing is endurance events where 3-4 people share a car over 24 hours. So iRacing added team races at some point. I've done a few things with data endpoints from iRacing, and it reveals a bit about how they did it. Every driver has an ID. It's just an integer sequentially increasing every time a new person joins the service. Teams, however, are the opposite. Every time a new team is created they are assigned a negative ID, perpetually decreasing as new teams are created. Because of this, an entry into a racing session can be handled by way of a single database column for both drivers and teams. Keep in mind that a racing session is either a "driver session" or a "team session" - you can't have drivers and teams in the same session. You can, however, have teams with just one driver in them. iRacing is a service that started development in 2004, using custom race simulation tech from ~2001, was released in 2008, and perpetually updated since then. The team is quite small, and has always been. If there are any questions I have 6 years of experience of both racing and developing third-party tools for the service, and I'll gladly share some knowledge if questions arise.
  - sanesmith 6y ago
    Thanks for these insights! I always knew that the underlying tech was fairly old, but I didn't realize development began in 2001. I've been looking at the SDK thread in the iRacing forums and its definitely interesting to see how its structured.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    Soon-to-be (hopefully) iRacing user here. Are there (or could there be) extensions that improve on the simulation aspects of iRacing? Or is it considered already good enough? Are there tools/extensions you would consider essential?
    - herbstein 6y ago
      As far as the raw simulation goes, you get what you get with iRacing. Because of the online-only nature of the service tampering with it is impossible as an end-user. However, there are a few external things can help with immersion and getting an overview. The one I find the most crucial is "Crew Chief". iRacing tells you when someone is beside you, a slower car is ahead, and stuff like that. Crew Chief does all of this, but also gives you a bunch of more information without making it an overload. With the voice-interface and spoken information you could completely turn off every HUD element in the simulator without losing the ability to e.g. set pitstop parameters or knowing how far ahead of the person behind is. Another option to super-sede the default iRacing interface is "Kapps" (short for "Kutu Apps"). It's what practically every streamer uses for their overlays, but it's also very usable for your own racing. Gives more details about you competition and your potential fuel strategy. When doing the big endurance events with a team you might want to be able to get a more strategic overview of the race as it evolves. Joel Real Timing is a server and frontend that gives you information on deltas, pit stop timing, laptimes, consistenty, etc. for every car on track. I wouldn't say it's very useful as a solo driver, but as a team it's invaluable. All of this said, however, don't mistake being kitted out for being fast. These three apps are essentially usability improvements and niceties compared to the normal interface. You can easily plan out your endurance race, or do any sprint race, without any of this. Most important is to get a lot of seat hours and practice. You don't need to worry about all of these fancy information-gathering apps before they'll actually make a real difference to your driving. And that might take a good while, depending on your skill level. Similarly, for a lot of people there is a lot of focus on setups. When some peoplewant to try a new car, or a new track, they always start asking around for a setup that fits well. 1) iRacing just recently added standard setups for popular track/car combinations - there already was a "baseline" setup available for each car 2) a setup can maybe give you a second at the most egregious. When you're two seconds off-pace no amount of setup is gonna make you magically faster. I've won endurance races in the higher end of the rankings with the baseline setup, after a bunch of practice, against people that have sweated over their setups for weeks before the race. Don't fall into that pitfall when starting out. [0]: http://thecrewchief.org/ http://thecrewchief.org/ [1]: https://kapps.kutu.ru/ https://kapps.kutu.ru/ [2]: https://joel-real-timing.com/index_en.html https://joel-real-timing.com/index_en.html
- notretarded 6y ago
  what do you think HTTP GET /foo.js does? This is no different.
Fuzzwah 6y ago
Great to see other people who have been tinkering with iRacing things. Personally I've been working on a stats system for a while now, collecting the results from every official race and generating interesting info and charts. The latest feature is a discord bot that exposes this info on demand. https://irstatsbot.fuzzwah.com/ https://irstatsbot.fuzzwah.com/
rdgthree 6y ago
Neat, iRacing on HN is a collision of worlds for me. Outside of software, I'm a huge racing fan and spend a fair bit of time on iRacing (mostly oval). I've been wanting to build something related but haven't come up with any ideas that I love yet. Cool to see I'm not the only one!
atemerev 6y ago
TIL about iRacing. I enjoy driving, I owned a Jaguar XK-8 once, and I happen to have a HTC Vive Pro lying idle on my desk since the time of HL Alyx. What have you done.
- Shorel 6y ago
  Really? Simracing seems to have got big in the times of Covid. I started simracing (again) in February/March 2020.
LaundroMat 6y ago
Fwiw, I paused my iRacing subscription for the first time in 6 years. The subscription system + extra DLC is just too costly, especially since competitors like Assetto Corsa and RaceRoom are catching up quite rapidly with regards to making sure the multiplayer is enjoyable. Plus they are more open to modding.
rubenv 6y ago
Cool, didn't know there were iRacers on HN! If anyone is interested, we're building a new (and hopefully) better platform to handle telemetry/race data over on https://garage61.net/ https://garage61.net/ It's still super alpha so not much to see yet, but moving fast (the HN-way :-)). Love to have a chat with any fellow iRacing HN users, we're on Discord: https://discord.gg/94XwwyCkCW https://discord.gg/94XwwyCkCW AMA related to iRacing / telemetry
- Fuzzwah 6y ago
  Sign up form doesn't seem to be working for me.
  - rubenv 6y ago
    In case anyone else has trouble: turns out this was a Bitwarden auto-fill problem (thanks for dropping by on Discord to figure it out). Will get this one fixed ASAP.

81 points by sanesmith 6y ago

Happy to see another iracer here. Got mine in June and it’s been a blast. I’ve looked into doing some dev related work, seems like the apis are funky and limitations can be quite odd. This will probably be my inspiration to build out a side project. Good luck, have fun, and see you on the track

sanesmith 6y ago
Thats awesome, glad I was able to inspire you! Yeah, iRacing can be tons of fun and the level of realism is impressive. I live within walking distance of Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and have walked and biked the track more times than I can count and the the sim gets so many of the track details right.
- dan00 6y ago
  Do you have any clue how the spotter gets the info of near opponents? So the basis for the „left/right side“ messages. I would really like to have a visual spotter similar to Assetto Corsa Competizione.
philjohn 6y ago
The biggest limitation, IMHO, is limiting telemetry to 60hz which makes things like FFB and motion rigs less high fidelity.

enw 6y ago

Why would an API ever return a literal JavaScript statement?

sanesmith 6y ago
Author here! I have no idea to be honest, I thought it was strange when I saw it in the Python version too. I'm still learning the API and it seems that "iRacing’s telemetry comes in three variations, data written to an .ibt file 60 times a second, live data exposed to our telemetry API 60 times a second, and a session string in YAML format that contains more or less static information about the session. The YAML string is appended to the end of the .ibt file but only a small portion of that data is exposed to ATLAS."
jachee 6y ago
There are so many "Why would...?" questions in and around the iRacing world. The influx of capital from pandemic-induced interest has seen some improvement (e.g. The iRacing members' forum is now, for the first time afaik, separated from the rest of the site/service, and no longer needs to be offline during maintenance.) So, there is hope of further improvement.
herbstein 6y ago
iRacing is a bunch of kludges all the way down. For the longest time the only way to race was as a solo driver. However, some of the biggest races in the world of real racing is endurance events where 3-4 people share a car over 24 hours. So iRacing added team races at some point. I've done a few things with data endpoints from iRacing, and it reveals a bit about how they did it. Every driver has an ID. It's just an integer sequentially increasing every time a new person joins the service. Teams, however, are the opposite. Every time a new team is created they are assigned a negative ID, perpetually decreasing as new teams are created. Because of this, an entry into a racing session can be handled by way of a single database column for both drivers and teams. Keep in mind that a racing session is either a "driver session" or a "team session" - you can't have drivers and teams in the same session. You can, however, have teams with just one driver in them. iRacing is a service that started development in 2004, using custom race simulation tech from ~2001, was released in 2008, and perpetually updated since then. The team is quite small, and has always been. If there are any questions I have 6 years of experience of both racing and developing third-party tools for the service, and I'll gladly share some knowledge if questions arise.
- sanesmith 6y ago
  Thanks for these insights! I always knew that the underlying tech was fairly old, but I didn't realize development began in 2001. I've been looking at the SDK thread in the iRacing forums and its definitely interesting to see how its structured.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Soon-to-be (hopefully) iRacing user here. Are there (or could there be) extensions that improve on the simulation aspects of iRacing? Or is it considered already good enough? Are there tools/extensions you would consider essential?
  - herbstein 6y ago
    As far as the raw simulation goes, you get what you get with iRacing. Because of the online-only nature of the service tampering with it is impossible as an end-user. However, there are a few external things can help with immersion and getting an overview. The one I find the most crucial is "Crew Chief". iRacing tells you when someone is beside you, a slower car is ahead, and stuff like that. Crew Chief does all of this, but also gives you a bunch of more information without making it an overload. With the voice-interface and spoken information you could completely turn off every HUD element in the simulator without losing the ability to e.g. set pitstop parameters or knowing how far ahead of the person behind is. Another option to super-sede the default iRacing interface is "Kapps" (short for "Kutu Apps"). It's what practically every streamer uses for their overlays, but it's also very usable for your own racing. Gives more details about you competition and your potential fuel strategy. When doing the big endurance events with a team you might want to be able to get a more strategic overview of the race as it evolves. Joel Real Timing is a server and frontend that gives you information on deltas, pit stop timing, laptimes, consistenty, etc. for every car on track. I wouldn't say it's very useful as a solo driver, but as a team it's invaluable. All of this said, however, don't mistake being kitted out for being fast. These three apps are essentially usability improvements and niceties compared to the normal interface. You can easily plan out your endurance race, or do any sprint race, without any of this. Most important is to get a lot of seat hours and practice. You don't need to worry about all of these fancy information-gathering apps before they'll actually make a real difference to your driving. And that might take a good while, depending on your skill level. Similarly, for a lot of people there is a lot of focus on setups. When some peoplewant to try a new car, or a new track, they always start asking around for a setup that fits well. 1) iRacing just recently added standard setups for popular track/car combinations - there already was a "baseline" setup available for each car 2) a setup can maybe give you a second at the most egregious. When you're two seconds off-pace no amount of setup is gonna make you magically faster. I've won endurance races in the higher end of the rankings with the baseline setup, after a bunch of practice, against people that have sweated over their setups for weeks before the race. Don't fall into that pitfall when starting out. [0]: http://thecrewchief.org/ http://thecrewchief.org/ [1]: https://kapps.kutu.ru/ https://kapps.kutu.ru/ [2]: https://joel-real-timing.com/index_en.html https://joel-real-timing.com/index_en.html
notretarded 6y ago
what do you think HTTP GET /foo.js does? This is no different.

Fuzzwah 6y ago

Great to see other people who have been tinkering with iRacing things. Personally I've been working on a stats system for a while now, collecting the results from every official race and generating interesting info and charts. The latest feature is a discord bot that exposes this info on demand. https://irstatsbot.fuzzwah.com/ https://irstatsbot.fuzzwah.com/

rdgthree 6y ago

Neat, iRacing on HN is a collision of worlds for me. Outside of software, I'm a huge racing fan and spend a fair bit of time on iRacing (mostly oval). I've been wanting to build something related but haven't come up with any ideas that I love yet. Cool to see I'm not the only one!

atemerev 6y ago

TIL about iRacing. I enjoy driving, I owned a Jaguar XK-8 once, and I happen to have a HTC Vive Pro lying idle on my desk since the time of HL Alyx. What have you done.

Shorel 6y ago
Really? Simracing seems to have got big in the times of Covid. I started simracing (again) in February/March 2020.

LaundroMat 6y ago

Fwiw, I paused my iRacing subscription for the first time in 6 years. The subscription system + extra DLC is just too costly, especially since competitors like Assetto Corsa and RaceRoom are catching up quite rapidly with regards to making sure the multiplayer is enjoyable. Plus they are more open to modding.

rubenv 6y ago

Cool, didn't know there were iRacers on HN! If anyone is interested, we're building a new (and hopefully) better platform to handle telemetry/race data over on https://garage61.net/ https://garage61.net/ It's still super alpha so not much to see yet, but moving fast (the HN-way :-)). Love to have a chat with any fellow iRacing HN users, we're on Discord: https://discord.gg/94XwwyCkCW https://discord.gg/94XwwyCkCW AMA related to iRacing / telemetry

Fuzzwah 6y ago
Sign up form doesn't seem to be working for me.
- rubenv 6y ago
  In case anyone else has trouble: turns out this was a Bitwarden auto-fill problem (thanks for dropping by on Discord to figure it out). Will get this one fixed ASAP.